Okay, i know some of you think i'm mad, but if you have an Arduino at home, and want to buy some blank AVR chips on Ebay and bootloader/program them, DON'T! Instead, why not get them totally FREE from the manufacturer themselves? All you need is to do sign up at the Manucfaturer : Atmel website and you are good to go.

I am currently designing some very budget friendly Motor drivers, and to test the design out, I am giving away 10 free drivers! Each driver is a single or possibly dual (5 single and 5 dual) transistor based design, and cost per board is very, very low. If you would like one of these free driver boards, please post in the forum below. No restrictions! Each board ships with a application note so you know how to use it.

Hey, so you've all heard of Free day over at SFE right? Doubtless everyone on LMR is participating, but I would just like to point out something. Buy only what you need. Try not to spend all 100 bucks available to you! Save some for others! If we all used 100 bucks, there would only be 1000 slots. If we used less, say 50 bucks, more people could join in! So please, just remember: This is a gift from Sparkfun. Please don't take advantage of it. Thanks!

I wanted my current robot project to make cool bleeps bloops and other stupid noises. Instead of just doing it I spent three days writing software to make an easy job "easier". Well, okay, I spent two days doing it wrong, then switched to Python and tried again. This package is the end result. It consists of an Arduino sketch that makes noise from numbers, and a GUI Python frontend to make it "clickier" (oooh).

A quick tip for all you cheap skates out there. I've always had it in my head that I would like my robot to have no permanent connections, to allow me to experiment and reconfigure. This also has the nice side effect of less soldering for me to mess up. I actually have a cunning plan to pay my flatmate in jelly beans to do the tough bits for me; he's an electrical engineer (rock!).